A 26-year-old former textile-factory worker and amateur parachutist, Tereshkova beat out four other candidates to fly the Vostok 6 mission. Her flight, coordinated with the already-orbiting Vostok 5, made her the only woman to fly a solo space mission and the first civilian in space. She would not fly again, but her mission was a propaganda triumph for the USSR and a milestone unmatched by the United States for nearly two decades.
Valentina Tereshkova had never flown a plane before joining the cosmonaut corps; her qualification was parachuting, which she had taken up as a hobby, jumping more than 90 times before her selection. Soviet planners wanted a woman in space largely for propaganda purposes, to prove socialism's supposed equality between the sexes, and Tereshkova, the daughter of a tractor driver killed in World War II, fit the ideal biography perfectly.
During the flight she experienced nausea and physical discomfort that she reportedly underreported to controllers, wary of jeopardizing future missions for women. She still managed to keep a flight log and take photographs of the horizon that scientists later used to identify aerosol layers in the atmosphere.
No other woman flew in space until Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982, and NASA did not send a woman, Sally Ride, until 1983. Tereshkova returned to Earth a national hero, married fellow cosmonaut Andriyan Nikolayev in a wedding attended by Khrushchev, and later became a prominent Soviet and Russian political figure, serving decades later in the State Duma.
Key people: Valentina Tereshkova